We have veered off track in this conversation. I’ve been trying to return to the days when we could dream about another way of life. If we thought about politics at all, we assumed our elected officials knew they’d reached a dead end and that it was time for a change. Those days ended when we decided to support a presidential candidate. We learned we were never taken seriously–we were merely a threat. We have already talked about our shock and disgust at the tactics of conservatives in both parties. What we haven’t talked about is whether the so-called left shares our vision of the way forward.
We didn’t require Bernie to share our vision in 2016. We supported him because he was our best bet. We believed when he became president he would listen to us. But now it is becoming clear that even if he had won he might never have been ours. Bernie and his solutions belong to another time. When he dreams he dreams about times past.
Of course he’s not the only one. There’s a lot of that going around. The Catholics who fight Pope Francis are doing exactly the same thing. Unfortunately we made it easy for them by supporting someone with a ‘socialist’ past for president. Reactionaries need an enemy and we gave them one. We wrote their script.
The left will object that socialist policies are exactly what we need to combat inequality. First, assuming inequality is the priority, you have to be president to put those policies in place. Second, it is not clear that workers’ prosperity will solve our problem. I admit it has been infuriating watching Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin play their part in assuring that Bernie’s programs don’t get passed, but don’t forget they are Bernie’s programs–not ours. Sinema and Manchin prefer it that way.
Reactionaries dream of an enemy like Bernie. They never have to reveal their uselessness in dealing with today’s problems because all they have to do is fight Bernie. It lets them hide the fact that they are not the people we need for the problems we are facing.
We are losing farmland to desertification. The green revolution has run its destructive course, depleting the land and polluting water supplies world-wide, and apparently no one is concerned about this at all. Politicians continue to beat their natalist drums while bombing far-away people out of house and home and refusing to give them refuge. And now they withhold covid vaccines from entire countries just because they can. Strangely, they don’t seem to be aware that their bad behavior is catching up with them–the vaccine policy may finally ruin them.
The supply chain is breaking down. This affects the automotive repair industry, the construction industry, the medical industry–basically any industry that depends on the supply chain. Could it be that parts and supplies and logistics and transportation depend on countries that didn’t get vaccinated?
Making workers more prosperous is a worthy goal. However our first priority today is survival, and we’re already failing. We have a global problem that must be solved globally. The supply chain demonstrates it is literally suicidal to throw entire peoples to the wolves.
So what should we do? We could start by making Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and the right-wingers on Twitter tell us what they will do about the supply chain. Ask them if they’ve made preparations for shortages in their own states. Ask Sinema what she’ll do when the Colorado River doesn’t have enough water to farm and fish. Ask her what she thinks about wealthy countries withholding vaccines from poor countries. Of course, first you’d have to catch up with her, and then you’d have to get her attention, and then you’d have to convince her she’s just an earthling, like the rest of us.
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